Page 108 of Asher Black (The Five Syndicates)
“Think this thr
ough, Asher.” I take a step forward and wrap my arms around his waist, tilting my head up to look at his face. “If you do this, there’s no going back. René isn’t part of the underworld. He was on the board for your company, a company that only just cancelled their meeting to vote on whether or not you’re a risk to its wellbeing. You do this, and you’re as good as done at Black Enterprises.”
“I don’t care.” There’s a stubborn expression on his face. “I have to do this, Lucy.”
“Why?”
“Because they went after you.”
My heart warms, realizing yet again how much this man is willing to risk for me.
But I can’t let him.
“They went after you, too, so I get a say in this. And I don’t want him dead. I want him to rot in jail.” I grab his hand, unclench his fist, and intertwine our fingers together. “Please, do this for me, Asher.”
There’s a long stretch of silence before he nods, and I sag in relief, my body swaying onto his.
He catches my weight and smirks. “Was that our first couple’s fight?”
Rolling my eyes, I pull back and smack him playfully on the arm. Then, I walk towards the kitchen with Asher trailing behind me. When I enter the kitchen, more of Asher’s security team is there, surrounding the kitchen island. Even Xavier is standing here, which I assume means the bomb has been disarmed.
“The rest of the guards are calling contacts and setting up in a perimeter around the building,” Xavier says to Asher, who nods.
I eye the countertops. A few bottles of tequila lay strewn across the marble, along with at least a dozen shot glasses. Xavier pours me a shot and hands it to me.
I grab it. “What are we drinking to?”
“The fact that we still can.”
I down the shot.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The opposite of courage in
our society is not cowardice.
It is conformity.
Rollo May
It’s all sorts of wrong, but I find myself laughing under my breath when the cops come and some of their eyes bulge at the ridiculous amount of bodies that lay strewn around the building.
Apparently, Asher’s perimeter guards killed fifteen of their men in the garage. Along with the fourteen I watched die on the security cameras, the thirteen that were already dead before that, and the guard whose throat was slit, the body count is a mindboggling forty-three.
René didn’t just hire a few men.
He hired a small army.
And they failed.
I learned that Xavier and the other twelve men that were in the hallway with them were able to get to us so quickly because they live on the floor below ours, which is another security measure that’s need-to-know. They didn’t even explain that to the cops.
Nor did they discuss their bulletproof clothes.
Instead, Asher and the entire security team put on clunky bulletproof vests over their shirts before the cops arrived, then put on a convincing show of explaining how the attackers only hit their vests. They even had all the bullets that were shot at them tucked away in a Ziploc evidence bag before the police arrived.
“So, none of these cameras picked up a thing?” a female detective asks Asher.
